Murder on High (7 page)

“Every way, near’s I can tell. Always wore old, baggy clothes and a straw hat; walked everywhere—didn’t believe in cars, or telephones, for that matter. Lived right here in town, and didn’t have a telephone. Can you fathom that?” He shook his blond head in disbelief.

Not unlike Thoreau himself, Charlotte thought.

“A lot of people thought she was a mite prickly,” Pyle continued. “She had strong opinions about a lot of things, and she didn’t mind telling people their business—that’s for sure.”

“Then she made enemies,” said Charlotte.

Pyle nodded. “Plenty of ’em. She was kind of a hermit, though. Miss Ouellette took care of all of her business: shopping, errands, and so on. It wasn’t that she didn’t get out and about—you’d always see her out walking—but she didn’t mingle much, if you know what I mean.”

“A hermit-about-town,” said Charlotte.

“That’s it,” said Pyle with a smile. “A hermit-about-town.”

“It’s what New Yorkers used to say about Garbo,” she explained. The great Swedish movie star had just died and was very much on Charlotte’s mind, her death seeming to mark the end of a Hollywood era.

“Can’t tell you much more than that,” said Pyle.

“Now, Charlotte, why don’t you tell us what you know?” Tracey asked as the waitress set the heavy Buffalo-ware platters with their hot turkey sandwiches down on the Formica table. Speedy service was another virtue of the good diner.

“She was my screenwriter,” Charlotte said. “In the old days, we each had our own. She had been a novelist. Maybe you’ve read some of her books:
The Lonely Heart
is considered a classic; it’s on every eleventh-grade English teacher’s reading list.”

“I’ve read it, but it was a long time ago,” said Tracey as he tucked into his dinner. “In eleventh grade, as a matter of fact. I remember thinking that it was a girl’s book. At that point, I was more into Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

Charlotte gave him a look of distaste, at which he grinned and pounded his chest in an imitation of Tarzan.

“She came to Hollywood with the rest,” Charlotte continued. “Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. It was the offer they couldn’t refuse; the money was too good. Many of them ended up leaving. Either they hated it or they were no good at it, usually a combination of the two. But that wasn’t true of Iris.”

“This is delicious, Pyle,” interrupted Tracey, pointing with his fork to the food on his plate.

“What did I tell you?” the trooper replied.

“Sorry, Charlotte,” Tracey said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“That’s okay,” she said. She addressed Pyle: “It is good. Perfect, as a matter of fact. Anyway,” she went on, “Iris had a knack for comedy, which was odd, since her novels weren’t funny. She had a light, easy touch—a way of flirting with the material. I don’t think a man could have done what she did. She and I usually worked with the director Harold Ames. As a writer, actor, director team, we were unbeatable. We had hit after hit.”

“You’ve probably seen some of those films on television, Pyle,” said Tracey. He reeled off a list of titles.

Pyle nodded in recognition.

“I owe much of my success to Iris,” Charlotte said.

“Then what?” Tracey prompted.

“HUAC,” she said as if it explained everything, which it did.

Pyle looked at her with a quizzical expression. “The House Committee on Un-American Activities,” she said. “Otherwise known as HUAC. Self-appointed guardians of American internal security from 1947 to 1953.”

“Oh,” said Pyle, who still looked baffled.

“Their mission was to expose Communists, and their special target was the entertainment industry,” Tracey explained.

Charlotte continued. “Iris had some friends—other screen writers, mostly—who were self-confessed Communist sympathizers, or com symps, as they were known. She had been very close to some members of the Hollywood Ten, who went to jail for their beliefs, as well as to other blacklisted writers.”

“Blacklisted?” asked Pyle.

Charlotte sighed. She was feeling more and more like a time traveler these days. She realized that she would have to start from Square One.

“If a writer was called to testify before HUAC, and refused to answer the sixty-four-dollar question, as it was called, after the quiz show, which was, ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party,’ his—or her—name was put on a list and he or she could expect never to work again.”

“Unless he or she implicated others,” interjected Tracey, who, thank God, had some acquaintance with the events of that era.

“Right. Those who were subpoenaed had the option of getting off the hook by naming names. And many of them did. Losing your swimming pool or your tennis court were powerful threats. But there were some who would rather have lost everything than turn stool pigeon.” Like Linc Crawford, she thought.

“Was Iris O’Connor a Communist?” asked Pyle in the same tone of voice one would use to refer to a child molester or a rapist. It was clear which side he would have been on had he been born a generation or two earlier.

“It didn’t matter. It was a witch hunt. Two hundred and fifty people were blacklisted. Thousands more were graylisted. And the FBI had dossiers on hundreds of thousands more, myself among them, I suspect.”

Pyle looked contrite.

To be fair, she thought, it was probably difficult for a thirty-year-old to see the idealistic appeal of a system that in those days was still young enough not to have demonstrated its essential unworkability or revealed the evil and corruption that went along with it.

“Anyway, in answer to your question: I don’t know. She wasn’t a card-carrying Communist, to use McCarthy’s phrase. She may have gone to a few meetings, but so did a lot of people.”

“Of the Communist Party?” asked Pyle incredulously.

Charlotte tried to explain. “The line between capitalist and Communist was thinner then. No group could have been more plugged into the capitalist system than the Hollywood screenwriters. Yet a lot of them were outraged at how blacks were treated; remember, there was still segregation then.” She paused for a moment to eat her dinner, which was indeed delicious, and then continued. “Then there was the Spanish Civil War.”

“The Abraham Lincoln Battalion,” said Tracey.

“Yes. A lot of actors and writers supported the Loyalists; some, like Hemingway (and Linc, she thought), even joined international battalions that were formed to fight Franco. Though that was all in the late thirties, the Red hunters had long memories.”

“I guess I don’t know much about history,” Pyle apologized.

What were they teaching in school nowadays? Charlotte wondered. “Anyway, it didn’t matter whether Iris was a Communist or not. It was enough to have breathed the same air as a Communist, and Iris had associated with a number of self-confessed Reds.”

Thinking about those days, Charlotte remembered a story she’d once heard about someone who was subpoenaed because they’d been at the same bullfight with Picasso, an admitted Communist. It didn’t matter that the person didn’t know Picasso, hadn’t even sat on the same side of the ring. He had been there.

“Did Iris go to jail?” asked Tracey.

“No …”

“What happened to her?”

“That’s a good question.” She was trying to remember. She had repressed a lot from that period. Part of it had to do with her own passive complicity, or what she perceived as her own passive complicity, in the witch hunt. Despite the fact that she too had associated with known Communists, one of her favorite directors among them, she had never been called upon to testify. The reason for this, she was sure, lay with her public image. It would have been impossible to convince the public that an actress who had made a career out of playing idle debutantes and sassy secretaries could ever have been a Communist. The same had been true of the war heroes; they were untouchable by virtue of their public image (except for Linc, she thought).

At the time, she had felt much as a Vietnam-era student who received a high number in the draft lottery must have felt—relieved at not having to take a stand (or rather,
the
stand). But as the hearings had dragged on, leaving a trail of blighted lives in their wake, she had begun to feel ashamed of this chapter in her life. Yes, she had joined the Committee for the First Amendment, flying to Washington with a plane load of stars to protest the first round of HUAC hearings in 1947, but the committee had folded almost as fast as it had coalesced, and other protest efforts were equally short-lived, especially after friendly witnesses starting naming names.

Iris’ was one of those ruined careers that had left Charlotte with survivor’s guilt. She supposed that’s why she had thought so little about her over the years, despite the fact that her name still came up with some frequency in literary and cinematic circles. What
had
happened to Iris? she asked herself. As she gazed out the window at the water falling over the dam, it slowly came back to her. “She was subpoenaed,” she said finally. “It was in the winter of 1952, after HUAC had reopened its investigation. I remember the date because several other people I knew got their pink slips at the same time. Her testimony was taken in executive session at a hotel in L.A.”

“Executive session?” said Tracey.

“It meant that the testimony wouldn’t be released. It was a deal that the lawyers were sometimes able to work out to avoid having their clients’ names dragged through the mud. But it only worked for the small fry. The big fish didn’t have that option.”

“What happened to her after that?” asked Tracey.

“She simply disappeared. Went underground, I guess you’d say. Most of the blacklisted screenwriters went to New York; some went abroad—Paris, Mexico, Paraguay; some moved to rural areas where they could live cheaply.”

“Like Old Town,” said Tracey.

She nodded. “The situation was better for writers than for actors or directors because they could change their names or hire fronts and continue working. A lot of them wrote for television. People used to say that there were more aliases in television than there were fleas on Lassie.”

“I like that,” said Tracey with a chuckle.

Having finished their meals, they leaned back in the sunny booth and relaxed, three empty platters on the table in front of them.

“That’s why the early days of television were so wonderful,” Charlotte explained. “The finest screenwriting talent in the world was available at bargain basement prices.”

“Is that what Iris did?” Tracey asked.

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. Television was my refuge for a while too. I would have recognized her work, or have heard about her. You usually knew that a script had been written by a blacklisted screenwriter.”

For a moment, the conversation lapsed as the waitress cleared their plates. “Any dessert?” she asked.

Tracey checked his watch. “I don’t think we have time. The hearing starts in twenty minutes. In fact, I’d better go up and pay now,” he added as he picked up the bill. “This one’s on the State of Maine.”

Excusing himself, he went up to the cash register.

Charlotte was still thinking about the blacklist era. “The writers who continued working were the lucky ones, even if they were only paid a pittance,” she reflected to Pyle after Tracey had left. “Many of the people on the blacklist ended up killing themselves, or drinking themselves to death.”

“Like Mrs. Richards almost did,” he said.

Charlotte nodded. She was reminded of the bottle of rum in Iris’ pack. She suspected it was more likely to have been an offering to propitiate the alcohol demon than the Indian god.

As she thought about the rum, she suddenly realized the answer to the question that was lying at the back of her mind. The link between Iris the screenwriter and Iris the nurserywoman was Thoreau’s essay,
Civil Disobedience
, which had inspired the Civil Rights activists and countless others to stand up to the Government in the name of justice. Thoreau had chosen to go to jail (if only for a night) rather than pay a tax to a government that supported slavery. Iris had chosen to sacrifice a lucrative career rather than testify against her colleagues. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison,” Thoreau wrote. Unlike the Hollywood Ten, Iris hadn’t been imprisoned, but she had created her own prison of sorts in this central Maine mill town.

At first, at any rate. It appeared that it hadn’t remained so, that she had, in fact, created a rich and rewarding life here. Charlotte could imagine her seeking out Thoreau’s words as consolation for her lonely stand, and then, taking comfort from the solace they offered, being drawn into the simple life he espoused. Something of the same sort had also happened to Charlotte as a result of her on-stage boat rides with Henry David in
On Walden Pond
. She had taken a more moderate course in her pursuit of the simple life, her experience at living in the woods being limited to her mountainside retreat, and there was much of Thoreau she couldn’t abide, starting with his admonition to “beware of any enterprises that require new clothes,” clothes being one of her great passions. But she found it interesting that both she and Iris, neither of whom could claim any natural propensity for rusticity, had discovered the Philosphers’ Stone in Thoreau’s prescription for the simple life.

She wondered how many other Thoreauvians there were. A good many, from what Pyle had said about the pilgrims to Hilltop Farm. The only other one she had ever known was Linc, an appreciation for Thoreau being a natural for a rugged individualist with a love of the outdoors. He could cite Thoreau chapter and verse. She still remembered the marked-up Heritage Press edition of
Walden
that he’d always carried around with him. It was one of his things that she wished she could have had when he died, but it had gone to his ex-wife or his sister, like everything else. To them, she thought with some bitterness, the book had probably meant nothing.

Dismissing her morbid thoughts, she took advantage of Tracey’s momentary absence to pump Pyle for information: “Lieutenant Tracey has indicated that there might be some cause to think Iris’ death wasn’t accidental,” she said. “Do you know anything more about it?”